When a company hires a few people a year, one recruiter does everything: finds candidates, screens them, runs interviews and makes offers. When it hires every week, that job splits in two. A researcher, often called a sourcer, finds and screens candidates. A recruiter takes the best of them from the first interview to a signed offer.
For a founder, the question is which part of hiring is slowing you down, and whether you should be doing the hiring at all. The answer depends on what each role does, when it pays to split them, and whether your build needs either.
| Researcher (sourcer) | Recruiter | Hiring manager | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Main job | Build a pool of candidates who match the role | Turn candidates into hires | Decide who gets the job |
| Typical work | Search channels, first CV screen, first contact | HR interviews, soft skills and motivation, setting up technical interviews, offers | Technical interview, final decision |
| Measured by | Matching candidates passed on per day or week | Time to fill, offers accepted | Quality of the hire |
| Needed when | Volume is high or the role is hard to find | Always, once you hire regularly | Always |
A researcher builds the pool of candidates for each opening. They use every channel that fits the role: professional networks, communities in messengers, freelance marketplaces, portfolio sites and job platforms. Posting an ad is only the start: a researcher reads CVs, checks whether each person fits the requirements, and passes on only the candidates who do.
When this article first ran, Maksim Antonov, a researcher at Rocketech, described the target we used: three matching candidates a day for one opening. The exact number depends on the role, but the principle holds. A researcher is measured on the quality and flow of candidates, not on hires.
The recruiter takes the researcher’s shortlist and runs the process. They look at each candidate’s skills, hold the HR interview, judge motivation and soft skills, arrange the technical interview with the people who will work with the new hire, and handle the offer.
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics describes this kind of work in its occupational outlook for human resources specialists: they “recruit, screen, and interview job applicants and place newly hired workers in jobs.” The median annual wage for the occupation was $75,940 in May 2025.
The two people work in parallel. While the researcher looks for the next candidates, the recruiter interviews the ones already on the list. Our experience was that this cut the time to fill a role and the time from first interview to offer, which candidates notice too.
Time to fill is the number to watch. SHRM’s 2026 recruiting benchmarks, based on data from more than 4,600 organizations, put the median time to fill a nonexecutive position at 39 calendar days. The load on recruiters is rising: extra-large organizations saw a 67% increase in the median number of openings per recruiter in 2026. A recruiter with too many openings has no time left to search, which is the moment a researcher pays for themselves.
The first version of this article named three situations where splitting the roles worked for us:
Below that, one good recruiter covers both jobs. A founder of a ten-person startup rarely needs a dedicated researcher.
Software that finds and filters candidates is regulated in the EU. Annex III of the AI Act lists as high-risk the AI systems intended “for the recruitment or selection of natural persons,” in particular to place targeted job ads, “to analyse and filter job applications, and to evaluate candidates” (AI Act Service Desk, Annex III). The Commission’s implementation timeline, which takes the Digital Omnibus amendments into account, shows the rules for these Annex III systems applying from 2 December 2027.
Whether your tool falls under these rules is a question for a lawyer. What a founder should do now is ask the vendor of any screening tool how it plans to meet them, and keep a person in charge of the final decision on every candidate.
If you need developers to build a product, and hiring isn’t your core skill, you may not need your own hiring team at all. With staff augmentation, we find the people and handle their hiring and onboarding, and they join your team, your tracker and your process. Someone already on our staff or in our pool starts in 3-5 days; someone we hire new starts within 2 weeks. It costs $39-55 an hour per person, with a $5,000 minimum. If nobody on your side can lead the work, a dedicated team at $6,000-9,000 per developer a month fits better.
Your own team is the better choice once the idea is proven and you need people on the product every day. That is the time to invest in recruiters, researchers and a way to share knowledge across the team, such as a community of practice.
Before you hire anyone, know what the build needs. You can get a free project estimate that turns your brief into user stories you confirm and gives you an hours range, a budget range, the roles and a number of weeks, priced at our published rate of $39-55 an hour. It shows which skills you need and for how long, so you hire for the plan instead of guessing.
If recruiting is your business, the bottleneck is often the paperwork around each candidate. For Hays, a recruitment company, we automated CV formatting: one CV went from up to 2 hours to 2 minutes for more than 200 recruiters. Our HR and recruitment software page covers other tools of this kind.
A researcher, or sourcer, finds candidates and does the first screen. A recruiter takes the shortlisted candidates through interviews to an offer. In small teams one person does both.
When there are more openings than one recruiter can search for, when a role has to be filled fast, or when recruiters take on other HR work. In our experience it paid off at 100 or more people growing by about ten a month.
SHRM’s 2026 benchmarks put the median time to fill a nonexecutive position at 39 calendar days, based on data from more than 4,600 organizations.
Yes. The AI Act lists AI used to filter applications and evaluate candidates as high-risk, and the Commission’s timeline shows those rules applying from 2 December 2027. Check with a lawyer whether a specific tool is covered.
Not always. With staff augmentation, the vendor finds and onboards the developers. Our people start in 3-5 days, or within 2 weeks if we hire someone new.
Carefully curated content for resourceful Devs, CTOs, and PMs. No spam.